Love is Strange

An Illusion Review by Joan Ellis

In a rare happening, Love Is Strange invites us to think. At just an hour
and a half, it is a short movie presented so carefully and with such
deliberation that it seems longer, probably because we have been encouraged to
wander around in our own minds. There are no big plot twists here, just the
ramifications of an incident that spreads through a family affecting each person
in a different way.
After 39
years together, Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are married under
the new New York law in a ceremony witnessed and celebrated by family members.
Because their marriage violates the dictum of the Catholic Church against sex
before marriage, George is fired from his job as music director at the local
church. At least we are spared the hypocrisy of his being fired for being gay.
Without
George’s income, the two men lose their apartment and are forced to separate,
each to find his own way to food and shelter with little money. Ben bunks in
with his nephew Elliot (Darren E. Burrows) and Darren’s wife Kate (Marisa Tomei)
whose son is Joey (Charlie Tahan), a sullen teenager who loses the privacy of
his room to his great uncle at just the time he himself is navigating the
painful and lonely transition of adolescence. Life begins to unravel slowly for
everyone.
Just as we
begin to think we have no sense of where this story is going, it dawns on us
that everyone is in some kind of a tough transition that is threatening the
layer of civilized behavior that covers us all so thinly. Until George’s firing,
the family’s fears and frustrations were held inside.
Since
writer/director Ira Sachs has given us no distractions to fasten on, we are left
to sink into the field of emotions he has set in motion. It’s a difficult
structure navigated beautifully by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina in understated
but deeply felt performances that turn the movie into a meditation on universal
themes rather than a movie plot.
Watch the
wordless reunion when George can stay away no longer. Watch the silent Joey when
his contained sadness erupts in sobbing on a stairway landing. Watch the patient
Kate become raw when she loses her writing time to the sadness unfolding in her
now openly troubled family.
Because it is
directed in such an understated way by Ira Sachs and acted by a cast that
responds to that mood, the movie becomes a trigger for universal thoughts rather
than plot specific ones. It seems probable that everyone in the audience will be
in a different place as the film winds down. My own thought went to the sad
inevitability that in every happy long term marriage or partnership, one or the
other will end up alone and living with loss. It is the beautiful quiet work of
John Lithgow and Alfred Molina that allows us to wander in our own landscapes.